ABSTRACT
If Romanticism is to be associated with any ancient religion, it is with one that is in vital ways diametrically opposed to Gnosticism, which is pantheism. Where Gnosticism is dualistic, rigidly separating the immaterial from the material, Romanticism tends throughout to unity and reconciliation. The manifestations of Gnostic belief or Gnostic mythology in Romantic writing are only ever occasional, speculative, and/or metaphorical. Far from offering intimations of Gnostic transcendence in its return to origins, however, "Alastor," like all the romantic poetry, betrays a deep scepticism about the status of its own "knowledge" or gnosis. Romanticism, shared the Gnostics' misgivings about the Creator-God of Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as sharing its tendency to read against the grain: the serpent in Gnostic mythology becomes the hero of the Garden of Eden story, the fall itself the beginning of salvation.
